EPT10 Grand Final: The Gus Hansen hokey-cokey and the Alberto Dayan spin up

The start of Day 2 can often mean a rush to the cash desk at hours that are frankly offensive to most poker players. Registration closes promptly at noon and if your money isn't on the table before then, you're out.

Gus Hansen was seen wandering through the lobby a while ago, his cellphone clamped to his ear, in the attempt to get a seat in the game at a few minutes past the hour. It remains to be seen whether he'll be successful, but they can be particularly strict about regulations these days. It's not at all certain that the powers that be will yield, even at the imploring of Full Tilt's premiere Ambassador. (See the foot of this post for update.)

Hansen perhaps should have taken the path to this tournament trodden yesterday by Alberto Dayan, who woke up in the morning in his native Panama and ended it bagging up more than 100,000 chips in a tournament he hadn't even intended to enter.

Alberto Dayan: Spinning it up from Panama

Dayan flew into the south of France at about noon, made it to the tournament room in Monaco by about 3pm and joined a PLO cash game. A dealer told him about the "Super Last Chance" hyper-turbo satellite to the Main Event and he thought he'd give it a spin.

About four hours later, Dayan was one of two players who had a €10,600 ticket to this huge event, and his plans had changed dramatically. "I said, 'OK, I'm going for dinner.' And then I was in."

Dayan sat down with his 30,000 starting stack and picked up ace-queen suited in the big blind on one of this first hands. The player under the gun raised, five others called, and Dayan made it 5,000 to play. The initial raiser bumped it up again, Dayan called, and they then got it all in on a queen-high flop. At showdown, he learned that he'd cracked ace-king.

"I'd been sitting here maybe five minutes," Dayan said.

The average stack at the start of the day was something like 55,000, so Dayan begins in pretty good shape--and certainly better than Hansen.

Four players did, however, make it into the tournament in time to play today: Yves Boschetti, Sergey Rybachenko, Ziv Vachar and Rumen Nanev. That brings the number of entries to 650 (unconfirmed as yet), which represents a significant increase on last year's 531.

All the information about prize pools, etc., as well as official confirmation of numbers will be with us later...oh, and just as I write that, news reaches that Gus Hansen has indeed got his money in the middle in time to play. The Great Dane joins us, as does Byron Kaverman (in addition to those mentioned above).

All the hand-by-hand action, including chip counts, will be in the panel at the top of the Main Event page. We will have feature pieces below that. There's also feature table action on EPTLive.